Courtney Hartman has never been one to linger long. A Colorado-born guitarist, singer, writer and producer, she is best known for her work beneath the surface, writing and recording with artists throughout the folk community. But with the release of her second album, Glade, Courtney is taking us with her into a world of her own making, with songs about home and abiding; pulling out the marrow of what makes us good and what makes us kin. Her own home is the beginning place for the questions set to song, held by the soundscapes of the valley where she spent her childhood.
After living for ten years on the east coast, Courtney made the decision in 2018 to leave the city and the band she was touring with and return home. “It is unnerving to carve out space when you don’t yet know what is meant to fill it,” Hartman recalls. She made a summer home in a Winnebago camper on her family’s property, an 8-acre farm on Glade Road in Loveland, CO. It was a simple season; tending to the land, mending ties and writing in the stillness of each morning. “Music during that time was a relationship I fumbled in. So I made a promise to myself - if writing didn’t bring healing or joy in some form, I could let it go.” But the songs came steadily, weaving together the pieces of herself she had forgotten.
The musical-well runs deep in Courtney’s family. As the third of ten children, she was picking up instruments in the house sooner than she could read, learning to sing harmonies to hymnal melodies with her older sisters and grandmother, and teaching her younger siblings to play. “There was chaos at home, to be sure, but music was something we could all do together. I think that was the reason it was so important to our parents that we learn from a young age.” Through her teens, Courtney led four of her siblings in a band, writing songs and booking shows at festivals and farmsteads throughout the country.
In 2009, Courtney left home for Boston, MA to study American Roots music at Berklee College of Music, paying her way with savings from teaching guitar and classical violin lessons in her community. She was soon on the road, touring full-time with the Boston-born band, Della Mae. Her seven years with the band garnered them two Rounder Record releases, a GRAMMY nomination and performances in over 30 countries, representing the US through music diplomacy.
Even amidst the years of heavy touring, Courtney continued to collaborate and write with other artists. These collaborations led her to release two duo records, the first with Robert Ellis, an intimate rendering of John Hartford songs titled Dear John (2017) and the second Been On Your Side (2018) a collection of duets with Canadian folk-singer, Taylor Ashton. In 2017 she was nominated for Instrumentalist of the Year by the Americana Music Association.
Somewhere in her travels, a friend set Courtney down with a Mary Oliver book. “Her words caught me off guard and I realized for the first time that you could feel poetry in your body.” It was around the same time that she also came across ‘Bird by Bird’, a book on writing by Anne Lamott. Both women speak about the correlation between writing and walking. With endless days on the road fraying her seams, Courtney felt the need to pull away, to know if what they said was true - to know if writing would come in the midst of walking. So with an occasion-made guitar from Dana Bourgeois and a few simple belongings, Courtney flew to France to begin what would be a 500-mile pilgrimage across Spain on the Camino de Santiago. Her debut record, Ready Reckoner, is a collection of her songs from the trail - ruminations on doubt and surety, the emptiness that must come before resonance, and the timely and urgent calling to care for the ground beneath our feet. The album was co-produced by Shazhad Ismaily and features collaborations with Anaïs Mitchell, Sam Amidon and Bill Frisell.
With Glade, Courtney is returning once again to answer a question - but this time it is a question of home. “Surely we all know what it feels like to return to a childhood home, to become again so suddenly the person we were when we left, however long it has been,” Hartman ponders. “In those early summer months writing for Glade, I was not making songs to be heard, but songs to mend and remake who I was in such a tethered and familial place.” Autumn came and Courtney moved into the loft of a barn on the property, steadily rebuilding the inside. With a small grant from Colorado Creative Industries, she gathered a few pieces of gear - a Craigslist computer, a Wasaphone mic, and a Casio keyboard from Goodwill - then pulled out her guitars and a few borrowed instruments and began to find her way into Glade’s sounds and textures.
In the well-worn words of Rilke, these are songs that live the questions. They are a comfort, a pause and an ache; a dance, a returning and a determination. Courtney may be most known for her work as a guitarist, on the stage and in the studio, but with her second solo release, through her voice and production, she paints again a picture of her own. She is a leader in sound and story, a steadfast listener, audacious in her honesty, in her walk and in her work. The songs on Glade beg to ask: why do we return to one place above all other places, and what is it that appears in the face of a stranger or someone who feels like home?
Courtney now makes her home in Eau Claire, WI with her husband and her daughter, a few hens and a garden.
photos by Jo Babb
